Thursday, March 21

Déjà vu

I feel like Yogi Berra, experiencing “déjà vu all over
again” with all the doom and gloom over what drastic cuts had to be made
when the sequester was allowed to stand and he Federal Government was forced to pare $85 billion from its bloated budget.It is hard to imagine any budget so tight
that you could not wring a savings of 2 cents on a dollar. But to hear our
President and his department heads tell it, there will be hundreds of thousands of layoffs, many air
traffic controllers furloughed, far fewer Border Patrolmen watching our south flank—it’s going to
be catastrophic!

Let me take you back in time to the year 1971.Ronald Reagan had just been elected for
another term as California’s governor.The Democrat legislature passed a budget that increased most social
programs, and called for the institution of new taxes to support those
increases.Reagan told them he would
veto that budget, and he meant it.

California legislators and the cooperative news media began
to inform the citizens of the state that no longer would California be able to
provide medication for old people and the criminally insane.They would not be able to keep jails running,
so they would of necessity have to free a lot of dangerous criminals.Many police officers and firefighters would
lose their jobs, thereby leaving crime to run rampant and fires to be left to burn themselves out.No money for school lunches for the children
of indigent parents—the list went on and on.The way the media and our president are sobbing while lamenting
this sequestration makes it appear the problems California faced—and they were portrayed
as horrific—were child’s play compared to the disaster facing our country now.

I remind you that cutting $85 billion from this year’s
budget is NOT a reduction.I repeat, it
is not a reduction below the amount our government spent last year.No, it is just a reduction in the PROJECTED
budget for this year.We will still
spend several billions more than we spent last year, but to cut this expected
increase, even though nobody on earth can explain how America can come up with
all that money to support this budget in the first place, will put our citizens in dire straits.

My mother, bless her, lived in California in 1971—as did
my wife and I.Mom would complain bitterly
about how Reagan was going to inflict such hardship and pain on the
long-suffering old people and the indigent. I explained to her that the
legislature would be the ones deciding whose budget was cut, and by how
much.I promised her that they would
find the money somewhere to support all the things they had assured Californians
were lost forever.

And they did.

If the disaster Obama predicts happens in America, it will
be because he and his Democrat cronies in the Senate WANT that disaster—not
because there are not better places to cut the bloated budget.I feel he is gambling that with a very
partisan media, he can convince the American people that the evil that befalls
us is all the fault of the Republicans.